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Saturday, August 08, 2009

Clunker Craziness

The government at it again, rewarding past irresponsible behavior. The Cash for Clunkers program is only available to people who irresponsibly purchased gas guzzling, imported oil drinking land yachts. We're paying up to $4,500 each to bail out several hundred thousand of these idiots.

I think the government should pay every person who owns a new car that gets more that 30 mpg combined a bonus, but that makes too much sense. I might even get a check.

Much like the Road Home Program generally benefited people who didn't have insurance.

We own 3 cars;

A 1993 Civic Honda del Sol - 31 mpg combined.

A 1994 Volvo 940 Turbo - 19 mpg combined.

A 2002 Volvo S80 - 19 mpg combined.

None of them qualify for the Cash for Clunkers program. They all get too many miles to the gallon. The Honda is easy to understand, it's tiny. But neither of the Volvos could be mistaken for an economy or compact car, in fact the S80 is too big for New Orleans.

2 comments:

Okay, here is where I depart from my liberal friends. I think this program is a stinker. We should be encouraging people to give up their old cars, yes, but not by helping they buy another car. We should be giving them transit tokens or bus passes.

It seems to reward "bad behavior" of owning a pollution machine over "good behavior" of driving a non polluting car.

I'd prefer a program that rewarded people who purchased cars that were substantially less polluting or use substantially less imported oil, regardless of their past sins.

Transit Policy is another issue. Transit Rider already receive substantial indirect subsidies. Although there is a school of thought those subsidies are not particularly effective and only bloat expenditures.